Week #809
Let’s VR like it’s 01995! We picked-up the Nintendo Virtual Boy faux-headset. This is really a box with some lenses that takes a Switch running the Virtual Boy emulation software to make a left and right channel for each eye to create a stereoscopic, 3D view.
The results are exactly what you’d expect, it feels like 30 year old VR technology. There are only 16 games out of the 22 ever released and they certainly feel their age. It is a great, fun experience and some interesting early experiments.
For some Australian projects their CFO reached out and asked for a data dump. They are reviewing the last 3 years worth of jobs, costs and invoices to see where they made money and were they lost as a general review of the company. Most of this data was easy to export from both our database and Xero. The slightly trickier part was merging the two. Sometimes an invoice was connected to a few small projects in our system, or a different enough name that we couldn’t with confidence match it. Now it’s up to them to do the harder business logic and find the good, the bad and the ugly.
Our WebRTC project is coming back.
Wednesday was the Solar Eclipse here in Reykjavik. Not much got done that whole afternoon. It was quite overcast and raining, but it did get dark for a few minutes as we passed through the moon’s shadow.
On Friday we published an article about our Newsletter Badges. We are experimenting with custom, dynamically generating SVG/PNG images for our newsletter subscribers. If you already subscribe, expect a little something extra next quarter.
Week #810
Surveys are now back in full-swing! We started a “one-off” survey project as part of some research at the University of Iceland. We did something similar a few years ago which resulted in an academic paper (You can read it online in Icelandic) It focused on the deteriorating reading levels in young Icelandic students and how home-reading was the proposed solution. The paper looks at the efficacy of the intervention. Now, we’re back looking to Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS). We have a long survey which teachers take before, during and at the end of the intervention. Then a much shorter survey which is answered weekly about the type and amount of PALS that week.
Our WebRTC project gave us a kick in the gut this week. It always worked when we tested in the office, but when trying to connect to a remote participant it failed. At first we thought it was our code, but it turned out to be an issue with the STUN/TURN servers. Once we switched the info and made it dynamic and not hard-coded in the app, we could move forward again. The regularly scheduled Friday meeting was cancelled – which is annoying. The client feels things are taking too long and behind schedule. They do take a long time for several reasons; we only work on this 1 day a week, it’s been summer, we got stuck on an echo issue, and meetings always get cancelled so it’s then 2-3 weeks between reviews. We offered to have them more frequently, but it doesn’t fit their schedule.
We met with the our contact to test our LEDs and it was a bit of a disaster, but we learnt a lot and quickly adapted. As it turns out, we’ve very rusty when it comes to soldering! On Thursday we did a bunch of software and hardware tests and on Friday it’s back to our contact to try it all again.
Our todo list is long and grows longer by the day. What tends to accumulate are ideas for things, big and small, that we’d like to try and prototype. Those get pushed down the list when deadlines are looming. We’re really hoping to get through a few tasks in August and in September, free-up some time to explore.
During the week we were listening to a podcast and a throw-away comment about the name of a British pub sent us down a rabbit hole. Pretty quickly we found the data we wanted, created a prototype of our idea and made a physical printout. Time to review and refine.
Bric-à-brac
This week we learnt about Hafrún (Ming Clam) a clam that was dredged-up around Iceland that turned out to be 507 years old, oldest individual (non-clonal) animal ever discovered whose age could be precisely determined.